"To change Sheffield for the better, the answer might lie in anger and civic action"

"To change Sheffield for the better, the answer might lie in anger and civic action"

Sheffield is one of the UK's most important cities for modern architecture, says Owen Hatherley, and we need to take action to stop it being destroyed.

The Jury's Inn is the sort of building that Sheffield has been producing a lot of since the 1990s. Mediocre, over-scaled, it could have been built absolutely anywhere in the UK at any time since 1997. So imagine my surprise to find inside scuzzy paintings of what the city used to look like. In the toilet was a framed painting, in a vaguely punky fanzine style, of the Tinsley Viaduct and the Blackburn Meadows Power Station, a massive concrete monument demolished, to cultish lamentation, 10 years ago.
I was in town for an event called the Sheffield Modern Weekender, a three-day celebration of what is ? or rather was, until the bulldozers and the developers got there ? the most important city for modern architecture in England outside Oxbridge and London.
Make no mistake, that's what Sheffield is. From the 1960s until the 1980s, its housing estates ? whether high density and urban at Park Hill and Hyde Park, or bucolic like Gleadless Valley ? were internationally famous, as were public buildings like the University's Arts Tower and Library, the Crucible Theatre and the Castle Market. What made them so exciting, at the time and since, was their embrace of the city's glorious topography, with rolling hills that turn almost every view into a panorama.
What to do with this enthusiasm"
When I first visited the city nearly a de...

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